No doubt some bankers make a lot but that is hardly the claim that EVERYONE with an MBA makes $250K. Case in point you are currently making nothing. Imagine that. I would point out that unemployment in the IT sector is about 3%. Why? Oh yeah because developers, network engineers, database architects, etc are indispensible. Any company which fired their IT staff would no longer exist in a few months.

According to Salary average salary for application programmers in CA is $94,000 with 25% making more than $108K. BTW less than 1% of application developers have a PhD, so yes that means it is a statistical impossibility for most of the high paid (say top 10%) programmers to have doctorates. Some of those filthy programmers making six figures have lowly bachelors degrees and in some cases ... <GASP> no degree at all. The horrors.

Incorrect, programmers can be bought from India for /10th the price and or course they'll pay Americsn programmers their $70K, that's not big money. An MBA grad starts at $250K, plus bonuses, this is a fact.

Experienced programmers make a lot more than $70K. There are very few software developers with PhD. That is just your nonsense that Phd = better. I have worked for a lot of senior project developers and none had PhDs. One might have had a masters but honestly nobody cared. What matters is experience solving real world problems none of which is learned in college.

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And no, it's not the programmers that make the big money as far as coding - it's the PhD physicists and mathematicians who then fell the programmers what models and programs to build and these are called black boxes which do high frequency trading which do in fact are responsive for a huge % of the trading activity and they make lots if money, but the bulk of the money, the big money is still made by traders, economists, heads if hedge finds, etc because a black box can't predict the future I'd see a good buy it simply trades in milliseconds based on a preprogrammed trend or news and it simply beats the human reaction time.

Once again I actually worked on statistical models for risk analysis and nobody on our team had a PhD. None. Models that were used in the pricing of tens of billions of dollars in distress assets. A half dozen computer science professionals (db engineers, developers, project managers) and a few statisticans no PhD.

Then again this is like a chef explaining to a guy who ate a hamburger once how culinary arts works. As for every MBA making $250K starting well that is just silly. Then again how much are you making on unemployment? My guess is less than $250K.

Naa, it may be not exactly the same, that's right. But I own still 1 Bitcoin after I spent it for a share. This Bitcoin has a double-usage: For the company to buy things like asics, and for me as a sleeping money ...

No you no longer own 1 Bitcoin, you own a share in a company and while it may have the same value as 1 Bitcoin, it isn't a Bitcoin. If you spent 400 Bitcoins and bought a car would you also say you still own 400 Bitcoins? You may have a car and that car may be worth 400 Bitcoins (today) but it isn't 400 Bitcoins. The money supply hasn't inflated, money was simply transfered.

If bitcoins are unregulated, this means that bitcoins are constantly circulating right? It's not like government money that is constantly tossed while new crisp bills are being made. Eventually this means that there will be so many bitcoins as they get mined that a single bitcoin will have nearly no value, right? Or am I missing something?

You couldn't have it more wrong.

Money circulating doesn't create new money. If I have one Bitcoin and I spend it with you, now you have one Bitcoin and I have none. There is no increase in the number of Bitcoins.

Ah, crazy-hazy-money-economics! If I invest one btc in a miner's company, I still own one BTC, but the miner's company also owns one btc ... it's the same with the banks: I give some sum on my account, the bank lends it to another bank, this to a customer, the customer to a friend and so on ... officially the sum remains the same, but for the use of it it's rising.

Yeah no that isn't the case. You no longer have 1 BTC. You have 1 share of a company which have different valuation, liquidity, and counterparty risk as an ACTUAL BTC.

In fractional reserve banking when you deposit $x and the bank loans out $0.9x both "monies" are functionally identical. They all shares the same counterparty risk, the same liquidity, the same valuation. No store is going to say "hey is this dollar bill the product of a loan deposit or is it unencumbered". Name me one BTC merchant which accepts shares of mining companies as a equivalence for BTC. I will wait.

This article is very interesting. In particular, the small section about the site "Atlantis" peaked my interest. Could it really be the police? Are the police allowed to sell drugs? I thought that they could only pretend to be interested in buying them in order to catch dealers.

At least in the US the courts have found that the police can use deception, lies, trickery, etc to catch criminals. Undercover police officers pose as prostitutes so posing as a drug dealer wouldn't be materially different.

Is there any reason you guys don't just use an existing coin, that already has an established userbase and secure network, to trade for gas cards?

Because obviously fungibility of a currency is a stupid idea. I mean it makes so much sense to have SexCoin for buying sex, and GameCoin for buying games, and Casino coin for buying Casino chips, and GoldCoin for buying Gold, and WeedCoin for buying Weed (I guess so you can ruin your neighbors lawn), and GasCoin for buying Gas. A large single well supported currency for buying sex, porn, games, casino chips, gold, weed, gas, and countless other products and services? Are you off your meds again? That would almost be the start of an economy or something.

I know there are a lot of naive people in the world, but ~$40 to make a client and launch a coin? I know the ONLY way I'd ask that little is if all I had to do was take the existing source code and then search and replace the names and maybe do 1 or 2 tweaks.

What do you think 90%+ of the launched coins are. EXACTLY that. Hell most of the time they don't even modify everything that needs to be modified. They use the same alertkey as LTC, they don't change magic numbers so nodes running multiple blockchains end up confused spamming LTC blocks into xCoin network for example. Hell in some coins they don't even change user facing strings so some error messages or confirmations will say "Litecoin".

To date there has been very little innovation in the alt-coin space:LTC, PPC, Freicoin (I think it is a stupid idea but it is at least innovative), Powercoin. That is about it. Everything else has been copy, replace, tweak, launch.

you forgot primecoin

Fixed I meant primecoin not powercoin. So many stupid names nearly impossible to keep it straight.

I know there are a lot of naive people in the world, but ~$40 to make a client and launch a coin? I know the ONLY way I'd ask that little is if all I had to do was take the existing source code and then search and replace the names and maybe do 1 or 2 tweaks.

What do you think 90%+ of the launched coins are. EXACTLY that. Hell most of the time they don't even modify everything that needs to be modified. They use the same alertkey as LTC, they don't change magic numbers so nodes running multiple blockchains end up confused spamming LTC blocks into xCoin network for example. Hell in some coins they don't even change user facing strings so some error messages or confirmations will say "Litecoin".

To date there has been very little innovation in the alt-coin space:LTC, PPC, Freicoin (I think it is a stupid idea but it is at least innovative), Powercoin Primecoin. That is about it. Everything else has been copy, replace, tweak, launch.

Now I am still not sold that these coins will be successful. For example I don't think merchants really care which POW is used as long as the network is secure. However all these coins required a little more work than copy, paste, tweak, and launch.

As I understand it, there's roughly 11 million BTC in "circulation". Assuming $100 per BTC, that'sjust a bit over $1 billion. The total sum doesn't seem all that daunting for the US, or several other governments. Even Warren Buffet could do that, though he'd almost certainly laugh if yousuggested it to him.

I don't think you understand how market prices work. $1B wouldn't buy 11M BTC. It wouldn't even buy 2M BTC. The current price is merely the last trade it offers no guarantee that ANY coins are available at that price much less 11M of them.

Yeah difficulty doesn't work that way. It is hard to understand what you are trying to accomplish but when you just start making up new meanings for words like "difficulty" it is hard to take is seriously.

If difficulty is cut in half without an equal reduction in hashpower, it will be twice as easy to find a block and thus in the long run blocks will be found twice as fast. If in any interval twice as many blocks are found then the average time between blocks has to be reduced in half.

Difficulty is what keeps the time between blocks at 10 minutes per block for given hashrate. Right now if Bitcoin network had the same hashrate but half the difficulty the time between blocks would be 5 minutes not 10.

For a given hashrate you can't halve the difficulty and have the time between blocks remain that same. To think that shows a complete lack of understand of how bitcoin mining works.

Difficulty is merely an artificial value to match the frequency that hashes are found to the desired timeframe between when blocks are found.

You need to know why things are done. Just like my toothpaste example, you need to know what toothpaste is and what it is for if you're going to found a toothpaste company, and the same is with creating a coin.

That's easy, toothpaste is a ponzi scheme that is going to explode after the toothpaste ETF and everyone is going to want their own tooth paste brand, so we need to get into the market now.

Also make sure the toothpaste expires in 2-3 years because everyone knows the government is going to take over toothpaste anyways but it doesn't mean you can't get in at the ground floor of the toothpaste ponzi and dump your worthless tubes on suckers before the government shuts it all down.

Why not use Scrypt as intended. Scrypt with default variables has beyond horrible performance on GPUs. Litecoin developers modified it to make it roughly 128x less memory resistant (using only 128KB total).

Just wondering, would underaged gambling with bitcoin be illegal? It would be the same concept as using regular play chips, except using bitcoins, and both are not considered "legal" tender. Would this fly?

Poker chips used in casino's aren't legal tender BTW so "legal tender" has no real bearing, I don't think a single gambling statute anywhere would be so restrictive to define "gambling" as only involving legal tender. As for legality there is no universal global all people covered law, so it depends on what law and where. Most gambling related statutes are wording to cover "for value". Bitcoin has value, gambling with Bitcoin would likely be covered.

Look at it another way if casinos are prohibited in your town do you think if you opened a casino which only exchanged chips for gold would be accepted (just happens to be next door to a gold dealer who both buys and sells bullion).

It is underpriced in that it generally costs more to make QRK than it sells for, but I think it's a PnD that's already on it's death throes due to lack of support from merchants or any use.

How much does it cost a botnet to produce 1 QRK? Remember stolen computing power and stolen electricity = 0.0000. CPU coin = botnet coin. Whatever you can produce with a single CPU the average botnet can produce 10,000x as much at near 0 cost. It never had a future.

You do realize it's possible to do the same with GPU's?Utilize the GPU of every PC that is part of the botnet? I mean a company already did it with bitcoin within their software (too lazy to google now)..

Agreed GPU raises the barrier slightly and botnet herders tend to go for the low hanging fruit. The issue of GPU botnets will only get worse in the future. Most low end systems now come with relatively (at least compared to prior northbridge based integrated video) powerful "on die" GPUs (GPU is part of CPU). Both Intel and AMD latests on die GPU are OpenCL capable. The threat isn't so much a botnet acquiring hundreds of high end systems as zombies but a botnet acquiring tens of thousands of openCL capable "on die" GPU based systems.

While relatively low powered (50 KH/s compared to a high end GPU being 400 KH/s or more) a botnet will make up for it with thousands or tens of thousands of units. It will take some time but it is inevitable.